


Unlucky

by saiikavon



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic, M/M, Pre-Relationship, pre-klance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-08
Updated: 2018-06-08
Packaged: 2019-05-19 15:23:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,161
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14876321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saiikavon/pseuds/saiikavon
Summary: Someone has been sending Lance curses, and he's going to find out who.It doesn't turn out the way he expected.





	Unlucky

**Author's Note:**

> @chaoticneutralastronaut on tumblr prompted me with modern magic au. Please enjoy!

Someone keeps sending Lance curses.

He doesn’t know who, thanks to the anonymity of the SpellChat app, but he knows it’s the same person. That’s because it’s always the same curse, and always signed very simply, ‘Good luck,’ which is such a snide thing to say to someone you’ve just cursed. The curses always arrive around Lance’s exam times, so he knows what they’re for, too, making the message all the more infuriating.

He works his ass off to counteract the curses, luck magic being his specialty, but it’s hard countering curses placed upon oneself. He also works extra hard studying, trying to make up for it. For a while, he manages to stay ahead of the curses.

Until one day he just can’t, and he winds up with a D-minus on an exam he’d spent an entire week studying for. That’s the final straw. That day, he storms up to his friend Pidge, phone in hand, and tells her he needs her to find the one sending the curses.

“Come on, Pidge, you’re the best scryer I know. You could find a needle in a haystack without even breaking a sweat.”

“Granted.” Pidge smiles, adjusting her glasses with a haughty air. “But even a scryer as good as me needs something tangible to work with. What have you got for me?”

Lance hands her his phone with the app open, and Pidge swipes through all the curses, a contemplative frown on her face. After a few minutes, she sighs, and tells Lance she’ll have to keep the phone overnight.

“There’s a protection charm on the app,” she explains, “to keep people from doing this exact thing you’re trying to do. I can dismantle it, but it’ll take some time.” She passes him another phone while pocketing his.

“This is a spare for you in the meantime. Also, if you could get me a list of people who might have it out for you, that would help me a lot.”

Lance thinks on this for a moment. He can’t think of many people who might want to curse him. There was that one professor who seemed to have it out for everybody, but curses didn’t seem his style. His ex, Nyma, might have been a candidate at one point, but he patched things up with her a week ago. The curses would have stopped by now if it was her.

Suddenly, it comes to him. He scowls.

“Keith. It has to be Keith.”

“Keith?” Pidge frowns. “That quiet guy in physics class?”

“He’s my _rival_ , Pidge,” Lance insists. “He couldn’t take the heat, so now he’s setting me up to fail. That’s just…ugh! I can’t _believe_ that guy!”

While Lance is fuming, Pidge doesn’t look convinced. “Well, I’ll look into it…I think this whole rivalry thing is in your head, but I’ll check it out anyway. Don’t do anything dumb until I have the results, okay?”

“It’s gonna be Keith. You watch.”

Pidge gives him a blank stare. “Uh-huh.”

Lance spends the rest of the evening plotting revenge on Keith. He’s now completely convinced it’s him, even if he doesn’t have any proof yet.

It takes Pidge hours to break the protection charm, and then the rest of the night to discover who had been sending the curses. She sends the image to Lance’s loaned phone the next morning, along with the message, _‘Well, I don’t believe it.’_

Keith. Of course it’s Keith. Lance had been so sure, he doesn’t know why he’s surprised to see that mullet-haired face staring back at him. But there he is. Lance is furious.

Lance storms off to campus to find and confront Keith, missing Pidge’s next message in his impatience.

_‘Don’t confront him about it just yet. There’s something odd about what I saw…’_

***

Keith hadn’t liked Lance when they first met, this was true. Well, perhaps not entirely true…he hadn’t understood Lance, would be the more accurate thing to say. Lance was loud and too bright, like fireworks, sociable to a fault, and cocky to boot. Not that he necessarily bragged about things, really, but he just seemed to exude arrogance from every pore; it was present in his smiles, in the way he flirted with every girl he met.

The way he got in Keith’s face, for no other reason than some silly “rivalry” he’d cooked up in his weird little brain.

So, yeah. Lance was a mystery, and an annoying one at that. Keith wasn’t sure just what he’d done to Lance to get on his bad side, but he figured if he just ignored the loud-mouthed idiot, he could finish the year in relative peace.

Except that Lance wasn’t easy to ignore, and Keith had a terrible habit of being curious about things that he probably shouldn’t be.

For starters, Lance wasn’t just superficially friendly, he was kind. Sure, he talked too much sometimes, and the bravado he put on could be aggravating, but it was also disarming. If people were put off by his energy, he acted like a goofball to put them at ease. He always seemed willing to lend a hand to someone genuinely in need, and that was…endearing.

Secondly, as it turned out, while Lance flirted a lot, he wasn’t just some playboy. It sort of fell in line with him being a friendly person, putting people at ease, and he’d never gotten in anyone’s space that didn’t want him there. If someone turned him down, he backed off.

He also worked hard, Keith noticed, after passing him in the library a few times. Generally he was with his friends if he was studying, groaning and complaining the whole time, but still making an effort. Keith started paying more attention to Lance’s scores, and noticed that it wasn’t as though he was doing poorly. His scores were usually just shy of Keith’s own—while it made Keith wonder why Lance would be bothered about someone else’s scores when his were perfectly fine, it was nice to know that Lance hadn’t started the whole “rivalry” thing to try and compensate for his own failure.

He never used magic to cheat, either, as far as Keith could tell. There were memory charms and mind-reading spells that students sometimes used to try and get answers during exams, not that any of them worked with cheat-wards in place. Still, he’d never seen Lance called out for one, and he had a hard time believing Lance would cheat anyway, after having seen him studying with his friends.

Keith isn’t sure what made him download the SpellChat app. He’d told himself he didn’t want to get involved with Lance in any way, but…looking back, he gets a fuzzy feeling in his stomach, thinking about sending him even that little bit of goodwill. There’s no specific rule about using good luck charms in class, after all, given the arbitrary nature of luck magic. Who’s to say how much it helped or hurt? If nothing else, it might give Lance confidence in the knowledge that someone is rooting for him. Keith isn’t sure why, but that would make him happy.

He isn’t sure why, then, in the following weeks, Lance seems more irritable than usual, more frustrated with his scores. He seems to be spending more hours in the library, grumbling to himself, glaring at his phone. Keith just sends him more charms, hoping they’ll eventually balance out Lance’s bad mood. He gets a sour feeling in his stomach that bubbles up more and more each time the charms fail to make Lance smile.

In hindsight, he probably should have pieced it together before he finds Lance storming up to him, livid and yelling something about curses.

***

Lance had imagined it would feel so satisfying, calling Keith out in front of everyone. He imagined people staring at the supposed golden boy, shocked and disgusted that he would do something so shady. It would be such sweet revenge for all the bad luck Lance has had these past few weeks.

Instead, Keith has the audacity to look completely bewildered as Lance reveals what he did, and Lance is the one who winds up looking like an asshole.

“Lance, what are you—curses? I don’t—”

“Don’t play dumb, Mullet!” Lance waves the phone in front of Keith’s face, showing what Pidge had found. “A friend of mine scried you out. You’ve been sending me curses on SpellChat!”

Keith immediately goes pale, which feels way too good. “Lance, I—”

“ _Lance_!”

Before Keith can mount a proper defense for himself, there is suddenly a vice-like grip on Lance’s ear, and he finds himself on the receiving end of Pidge’s fury.

“Ow! Pidge, what the hell?!”

“Outside, now!” Pidge snaps, and then proceeds to drag Lance out of the classroom with more strength than her tiny body should allow, Lance protesting all the way. Before they exit the room entirely, she shouts, “Keith, you get out here, too!”

There is some sense of satisfaction in watching Keith hurriedly scramble out of his seat to follow, but not much.

Once outside, Pidge rounds on Lance first, berating him for storming in to confront Keith when she’d explicitly told him not to. “I knew I should have led with that…should have guessed you’d go and do something dumb…”

Lance rubs the ear she had been pulling moments earlier, frowning. “You already showed me Keith was the one sending me the curses, what else do I need to know?”

Pidge sighs, then pulls Lance’s phone out of her pocket. “This.”

She then shows them both what she had seen. At first, it doesn’t look like anything Lance didn’t already suspect. Keith’s face appears, pure concentration coloring his features. His face seems permanently set in a scowl anyway, so it’s not a stretch for Lance to think of him as determinedly searching for the right curse to send. When he glances to his right, he sees Keith steadily turning pink as he watches the screen.

Then, Lance gets a surprise, as Keith sits back, having apparently picked out the appropriate spell, and his expression softens into a smile. Lance’s breath catches in his throat; there is nothing malicious about that smile, only gentleness along with the satisfaction. This doesn’t look like the face of a person who’s just cursed someone.

He looks to Keith, and that pale face is even redder than ever, and carefully speaks his name, to ask what in the world he was looking at.

“I was trying to send you good luck charms,” Keith mumbles. “I’m not good with luck magic, which is why I thought of using the app…but I guess I picked the wrong charm and wound up cursing you instead…”

Lance’s jaw drops. “I don’t—you—why?”

Keith shrugs up to his ears, suddenly looking very small. “I see you working hard, and you’re always so…friendly to everyone. I thought it might be nice to do something nice for you?”

He looks so shy, so sincere, that Lance feels his own cheeks heat up as well. Who asked his _rival_ to look so…so cute?

God, Lance _is_ an asshole.

“I am an asshole. Oh my god, Keith, I just yelled at you in front of everyone, and you were—I am so sorry.”

Keith rubs the back of his neck, still looking at Lance with that shy expression. “Hey, I might have thought the same thing in your position…I’m really sorry I messed up the spell. I caused you a lot of trouble…”

Lance smiles. “How about we call it even? No more spells, though. You can just come help me study once in a while, instead.”

Keith beams right back, and Lance would be lying if he said his heart wasn’t fluttering a little. “I’d like that.”

The moment is somewhat interrupted by Pidge, declaring that her work is finished and she’d like to collect payment. She holds her hand out to Lance, who then sputters indignantly, reminding her that she said she would never charge friends for scrying.

“This isn’t for scrying,” she replies. “This is for making me drag both your asses out here when you should have waited in the first place. Ten bucks is enough.”

Keith takes out his wallet, then hands Pidge the ten before Lance can protest again. “I’ll cover this one. This was my fault in the first place.” He pockets his wallet again, then turns to head back into the classroom, giving Lance a questioning look.

Lance smiles and follows him in, though not before saying goodbye to Pidge, who just waves them both off with a small smile of her own.

“So,” Lance begins, throwing an arm around Keith’s shoulders. “What kind of magic _are_ you good at?”

As Keith starts to tell him all about the uses of practical magic, Lance feels that he might have gotten a little of that good luck after all.

**Author's Note:**

> Check out my tumblr!
> 
> Main: http://saiikavon.tumblr.com/  
> Writing blog: http://saiikasnotebook.tumblr.com/


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